If you have been doing a print yearbook, you are going to find that your life was just made dramatically easier! If this is your first yearbook, you are going to find that putting a digital yearbook is delightfully easy. Let’s go over the procedure to build YearBoxx.
Paginate
It all starts with deciding what you want to put in your yearbook. YearBoxx, the first true digital yearbook, makes this easy. Once you have accessed your build software suite, YearBoxxCreate, you will see a Table of Contents. It has been prepopulated with the sections that a yearbook typically has, plus some that are unique to a digital yearbook.
You will see classic sections like:
- Seniors
- Faculty
- Sports
- Activities
You’ll also see new sections like:
- Future Events
- School/Class Videos
- Text Blasts
Additionally, you will be able to create sections that are somewhat atypical, like Championship Teams and Class Trips.
Collect Stuff
As you start to take and collect photos and videos, it is important to remember that there is no limit to the amount of material you can have in YearBoxx. You won’t be constrained by the number of pages your school can afford.
Most yearbook staff photographers will take far more pictures than could possibly fit into a print yearbook. For example, shooting sports is often fun for anyone who enjoys photography. There is so much going on; ten to fifty students on the team, multiple games, practices, several coaches.
Let’s take a look at a football team, often the biggest team in the school. Most yearbooks will dedicate between one to as many as ten or so pages to the team depending on space. Focusing on a ten-page football section in a yearbook, which would be quite generous, most schools don’t have a super large program that would require that many pages, but this example will make my point and is applicable to other sections in your yearbook.
After portrait pictures of the team and head coach(s), there will be a team picture and then a bunch of candid pictures. Most candid pages will have five to seven pictures in it. So, with the 9 pages we have left after the team and coach portrait pictures, there is room for another 60 or so candid pictures. In a more typical size yearbook, there may only be room for 5 to 10 pictures.
The yearbook staff photographers will most likely come back with upwards of 300 or so photos. Now, the staff must make a difficult choice of which 240 pictures to delete!
What Happens in YearBoxx
Now, what happens to a team, or event, or activity, or club, when working with YearBoxx?
The yearbook staff will log in to their YearBoxxCreate account, migrate to the sports section, select Varsity Football (there are options for JV and Freshmen). Now, they will drag and drop in the team photo, the captains, and the coaches. Then, they will select the 300 candid photos taken and drop them ALL into a box that says “Candid Photos.” The staff is DONE with the football team. This process would take all of five minutes. Oh, and this big football team (or activity, club, event) is not limited to 300 photos.
The yearbook staff can put 50+ pictures of EACH GAME. That could be hundreds of pictures—there is no limit.
Small Teams Matter Too
I want to make another related point. While this theoretical football team is particularly large, the tennis team is probably not. Let’s imagine there are 5 players on the team and 1 coach. In even a big print yearbook (plus 240 pages, note that most yearbooks are between 96 and 120 pages), the number of pages representing the tennis team would probably be one… if that. It is not uncommon for small teams, organizations, clubs, and events to not be represented in the yearbook at all. Now, our dedicated tennis team will get possibly two or three pictures in addition to the team picture in a print yearbook. That’s not a lot of memories.
However, in YearBoxx, that small team of 5 players and 2 coaches can have 300 pictures, 400. The tennis team, the golf team, track, baseball, basketball… the players all work hard, are all proud of what they have accomplished during their season, and DESERVE full representation.
Unlimited Memories for Everyone
Let’s take this ‘unlimited’ concept a little further. The sewing club can have as many photos as the football team. I use the sewing club because if a school has a sewing club, it is likely to be small and they may not get into the print yearbook at all. If they do, they will be represented by 1 group picture. But they also work hard, they most likely created any number of interesting garments, maybe they had a show at the end of the year. Why shouldn’t they be represented? Aren’t their memories important?
YearBoxx thinks they are. Everything they do can be memorialized, all their memories will be treated with the respect and dignity that all the other clubs, activities, teams, and events will be. Not everything that happens in a school year is outsized or a major event, but that doesn’t mean they can’t properly be represented in YearBoxx.
Don’t Forget Videos
Because, for obvious reasons, videos are not in print yearbooks. Well, it is 2025, and someone is taking video of most of the things going on in school, from sports to events to activities. YearBoxx can include them too—no limit. The small sewing club can have as many videos as our big football team!
So, the second thing that you need to do, after you have decided on what sections you want in your yearbook, is to photograph everything AND take videos. Put all the material taken and collected into dedicated file folders.
Build YearBoxx
Building YearBoxx is drag-and-drop simple. I have always enjoyed building print yearbooks with and for my schools. I truly love designing pages and sections and spent a great deal of time teaching my yearbook staff’s graphic design. Unfortunately, my staffs just didn’t share my enthusiasm.
While I was in the process of creating YearBoxx, one of my concerns was how to represent graphic design in a digital product. I struggled with this until I realized it simply didn’t matter. One reason was that, as referenced above, graphic design just wasn’t terribly important to many yearbook staffs. The second reason I stopped worrying about graphic design was that I was now working in a completely different medium—digital, not an 8 ½ x 11 piece of paper. Yearbook staffs no longer have to spend untold hours designing pages.
Celebrating Every Photo
This revelation was liberating. I stopped worrying about the presentation of the photographs and began celebrating the actual photograph. The biggest cellphone is around 6.8 inches. Even that size phone is really no place for showing multiple photographs. Now, EACH photograph is being celebrated, each photograph is getting all the reader’s focus.
The build process is simple as alluded to above. In the online YearBoxxCreate program, go to the section you want to build, open the folder that has the material for that section, and drag and drop it into the appropriate boxes (they are all labeled).
So… the process of building your YearBoxx Digital Yearbook takes hours, not months.
What About Deadlines?
There are NONE! That is not necessarily correct. Your print yearbook typically takes six weeks to print and another week or so to be shipped to the school, so the deadline is about seven weeks before you want to give it to the students. The “deadline” for YearBoxx is roughly seventy SECONDS. Hit the PUBLISH button, take a sip of water, check the hall for straggling students, and… YearBoxx is ready for the students to download.
Updates? Sure, Why Not!
You can publish YearBoxx on June 1. The students will immediately receive an email letting them know that their copy is ready to download. Two weeks later, the staff can photograph and build the Prom section, which will be automatically pushed into everyone’s YearBoxx. The same for Graduation, and additional pictures and video of the baseball team that went to the finals and our sewing club friends who had an end-of-year show. You can add material to YearBoxx even AFTER it has been published!
Time to Publish
At this point, you will realize that you are done but not feeling like you are because the whole process was so easy! BUT IT WAS. Go ahead and hit the PUBLISH button! As stated above, an email will automatically go out to the seniors and faculty letting them know that their YearBoxx is ready to be accessed. Please pat yourself on the back if there is no one around to do it for you.
I Published… Oh No… There’s a Mistake in the Yearbook… and It’s a BIG ONE
Alright, everybody calm down. Here’s what you do:
- Go into your YearBoxxCreate program.
- Go to the section where the “Big Mistake” is… and fix it!
Delete the picture, correct the misspelled name, address the grammatical error in the Principal’s Letter. Done. Now, go back to breathing. Isn’t this all stress-free?
Building YearBoxx Doesn’t Seem So Hard
We are not yet at the point where you can take a picture and tell it to go and plop itself in the Sports Section in your yearbook, but dragging and dropping photos and videos into boxes really isn’t difficult.
Migrating your yearbook to digital is stress-free, takes less time, needs fewer people, and gives students the Next Generation yearbook they want… YearBoxx!
Tom
Have comments? Email me! tkehoe@idiomyb.com
